FSB colonel Dmitry Kovalev has been spotted cheering Team Russia at hockey games in South Korea and testifying before Swiss courts to defend Moscow’s athletes. His official role masks a deeper portfolio: he belongs to the same FSB unit that supplied the nerve agent used against Alexei Navalny and other Kremlin opponents.

During the 2020 Court of Arbitration for Sport hearing, Kovalev acted as a forensic witness for RUSADA, arguing that the World Anti-Doping Agency’s proposed four‑year Olympic ban was unjust. He claimed whistle‑blower Grigory Rodchenkov fabricated data, despite evidence that FSB officers had swapped tainted urine samples for clean ones at the Sochi Games.

Investigative reporting by The Insider links the doping operation and the poison program to a single address and director within the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitutional Order. That directorate, described by the U.S. Treasury as managing internal political threats, oversees the same laboratory infrastructure that enabled sample tampering during the 2014 Olympics.

Kovalev’s phone records show multiple calls to Maj. Gen. Vladimir Bogdanov, head of the FSB’s Special Equipment Center, during the weeks surrounding Navalny’s August 2020 poisoning in Tomsk. The overlap of sports‑related testimony and covert poison operations suggests the Kremlin treats Olympic prestige and political repression as interchangeable tools of state power.